A convicted participant in the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack who was pardoned at the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency has been ordered to serve seven years in prison after a jury found him guilty of committing a burglary in Virginia in May 2025.
Zachary Alam, 34, had previously drawn one of the stiffest prison sentences – eight years – for his hand in the violence carried out at the US Capitol in Washington DC by supporters of Trump after his first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden after the 2020 White House election.
The judge who sentenced Alam after he was declared guilty in that case mentioned how officers regarded him as “by far the loudest, the most combative and the most violent of the rioters” at the Capitol that day.
He went on to spend nearly four years in prison. But he was unconditionally pardoned along with 1,500 others of his fellow Trump supporters on the first day the Republican president retook office in January 2025, after winning the previous November’s election against Kamala Harris.
Officers in Virginia’s Henrico county alleged that Alam broke into a home just outside the state capital of Richmond on 8 May 2025. After the family living there encountered him, he claimed to be at the home to fix its internet service, and he fled with electronics and jewelry, prosecutors later said, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Police called out to investigate the break-in then found Alam in an adjacent neighborhood, identified him as the intruder and arrested him the next day.
A Henrico jury subsequently found Alam guilty in October of charges of breaking and entering into an occupied home as well as grand larceny. And on Thursday, the county circuit court judge Randall G Johnson sentenced him to two decades in prison on each charge, though he suspended the entirety of the grand larceny punishment and 13 years of the breaking and entering sentence, case records show.
Alam was also told to serve 20 years’ probation on each conviction upon his release from prison.
Local television news outlet WRIC reported that prosecutors presented a recorded telephone call in which Alam expressed his belief that he had done “the right thing” on the day of the Capitol attack. That echoed comments he delivered at his US Capitol attack sentencing hearing: “I believed in my heart I was doing the right thing. Sometimes you have to break the rules to do what’s right.”
Alam was convicted in federal court of eight felonies – including assaulting law enforcement – and three misdemeanors for his role in the attack.
Witnesses said he broke the glass of a door through which insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt climbed before she was shot dead by an officer defending the US House chambers.
The Trump administration later reached a $5m settlement to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed by his slain supporter’s family.
At Alam’s Capitol attack trial, prosecutors outlined how he was among the first of a mob that entered the building from its west lawn and hurled items at police from a balcony.
He also used a helmet to shatter three glass panes in the door through which Babbitt was fatally shot before leaving while urging others to come back later with guns.
A statement from Henrico county’s top prosecutor, the Democratic congressional candidate Shannon Taylor, to WRIC contended that the pardon that Trump afforded Alam “emboldened him to believe the law does not apply to him”. However, Taylor’s statement alluded to how the president’s clemency was powerless with respect to the Virginia state charges for which Alam was convicted in October.
The arrest in Henrico, which culminated in Alam’s sentencing on Thursday, was believed to the be first post-clemency incidence of charges in connection with a new crime for a pardoned US Capitol attacker.
A few other Capitol attack participants have since been arrested for crimes committed after their being pardoned.